The region where amateur Islamic extremists are turned into killers:

They say the jungle on the Philippines island of Mindanao has its own acoustics. Gunfire doesn’t crack so much as roll: a low, brutal ripple that shudders through the trees and comes back at you from a dozen angles.

In the hills, local troops still stalk Islamic State-aligned fighters who know every ridge and riverbed, every place you can make a man disappear.

This is the island where the black flag rose above the city of Marawi in 2017. Thousands were dragged into a street-by-street war. Buildings burned until their steel frames twisted, foreign jihadis slipped in through the jungle to join the slaughter and more than 1,200 people died.

It took five months of artillery bombardment, air strikes and grinding urban combat by government troops to bring Marawi back under the control of the capital, Manila.

And it was to here, Mindanao’s ungoverned corners, that Sajid Akram, 50, and his equally hate-filled son Naveed, 24, travelled weeks before they staged their terror attack on Bondi Beach last Sunday. First to Manila, then Davao, then down into the labyrinth of the southern Philippines. Sajid on his Indian passport, Naveed on his Australian one.

The two men were seemingly just ordinary Sydney residents. Yet beneath that facade festered an ugly radicalisation, an ideological descent that culminated in a journey, back in early November, to Mindanao, where they were transformed from amateur extremists into trained killers.

If that was a shock, it shouldn’t have been. Interpol now warns that South-East Asia – with its porous borders and light surveillance – has become a major transit and training zone for Islamic State-linked militants after the fall of their so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq.

Since IS lost its last patch of Syrian land in 2019, the West has comforted itself with the idea the group is finished.

Sajid Akram and his equally hate-filled son Naveed (pictured) travelled to Marawi weeks before they staged their terror attack on Bondi Beach last Sunday

The Abu Sayyaf group is known for a litany of kidnappings, bombings, assassinations and extortions

In fact, IS is more powerful than ever. It may no longer be a ‘state’ but it has become something far worse: a decentralised, global insurgency, flaring up wherever authority is weak.

According to the 2025 Global Terrorism Index, IS and its branches remain the world’s deadliest terror group, responsible for 1,805 deaths across 22 countries in 2024 alone.

UN and Europol data show that more than 40,000 foreign fighters from 110 countries have left their homelands to join IS and Al Qaeda cells around the world since 2011.

The southern Philippines, and Mindanao in particular, is now a key node in the global jihadist movement.

The Akrams didn’t need to swear allegiance; simply being there was enough. Mindanao has become a finishing school for today’s jihadists.

They spent nearly four weeks on the island before returning home in late November. Two weeks later, they walked into Sydney’s Archer Park armed, prepared, and willing to conduct a pogrom against Jewish civilians on the first night of the festival of Hanukkah. The video footage from that day makes clear just how successfully the Akrams had internalised their Mindanao tutelage. They wield their weapons with easy competence, moving with the cold focus of men who have rehearsed killing and intend to enjoy it.

By the time officers had neutralised the father and subdued the son, around ten minutes after their attack had begun, 15 people lay dead, including a child, and more than 40 had been wounded. In under four minutes, Bondi Beach – a global symbol of sunlit optimism – had become a killing field.

In the hours that followed, the police narrative quickly arrived at a conclusion. Authorities reported that the shooters were ‘inspired by Islamic State ideology’. Police also said a vehicle registered to Naveed contained improvised explosive devices and two homemade Islamic State flags.

Typhoons – climatic and cultural – form on Mindanao, which occupies roughly one third of the Philippines’ total territorial area. At more than 36,000 square miles, it is bigger than Ireland and its population of 26 million accounts for just under a quarter of the Philippines’ total population of 117 million.

Members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in Maguindanao Province in the Philippines. The area has long existed in a strange geopolitical twilight: one-third jungle insurgency, one-third criminal economy, one-third jihadist hinterland

A Moro Islamic Liberation Front Fighter walks through a marshland in Maguindanao Province, Philippines. The southern Philippines is now a key node in the global jihadist movement

Counter-terrorist intelligence sources tell me the island has long existed in a strange geopolitical twilight: one-third jungle insurgency, one-third criminal economy, one-third jihadist hinterland.

While Muslims make up only 24 per cent of Mindanao’s population, in the west and west-central parts of the island Muslims constitute a significant majority. For decades, Islamist and separatist groups have fought, splintered, merged and metastasised here.

There are three main ones. Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) – the most violent – is known for a litany of kidnappings, bombings, assassinations and extortions. In 2014, a faction of the ASG pledged allegiance to IS and morphed into the IS East Asia (ISEA). Its occasional partners in violence are the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, named after a Muslim-dominated region of Mindanao.

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And then there is the Maute Group, the force that gained a bloody notoriety in 2017 for its capture of Marawi described above. The siege didn’t just incinerate the landscape: it lit a beacon that drew extremists from across South-East Asia and beyond.

After retaking Marawi, the Filipino authorities confirmed that dozens of militants from multiple countries – including Malaysia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Chechnya – fought and died alongside local insurgents.

Mindanao is now a vital training hub for jihadists, offering not grand ideological schooling – that happens online – but practical, lethal skills. Small-arms proficiency. Improvised explosive device construction. Counter-surveillance. Psychological conditioning. Urban-assault tactics. Tactical discipline. Everything a father and son might need to become the Butchers of Bondi.

But their terrorist outrage is only the most recent example of IS’s dispersed capacity for violence. The March 2024 Moscow concert hall attack, which was attributed to Isis-Khorasan, Central and South-East Asia, resulted in the deaths of 149 people.

This year, I journeyed to Syria, where in the prisons and camps I met former IS members who either accepted no culpability for what they had done or claimed unconvincingly they had never joined the caliphate in the first place.

People stand in front of floral tributes left at the promenade of Bondi Beach in Sydney after the attack

Camp authorities told me many of the prisoners were waiting for the return of the caliphate and had no interest in being repatriated to their homes in continental Europe or Britain.

Worse, their children were being indoctrinated into becoming the next generation of jihadis. I realised that many of these camps are effectively mini-caliphates.

Beyond Syria, IS now maintains ten active ‘wilayat’ (provinces) – from ‘Isis-K’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan to Isis-West Africa, Mozambique, Central Africa, Sinai, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Sahel – Isis-East Asia includes the Philippines. The picture is clear: IS, far from being crushed, is fully globalised. Mindanao fits neatly into this new jihadist architecture. Flying to Manila attracts nothing like the attention that travelling to the Turkish-Syrian border does. Western counter-terrorism still largely operates in the patterns of the 2010s, focusing on Syria and Iraq.

But the jihadist threat mutates and travels across the map like a virus seeking new hosts.

And in the West, of course, this virus encounters an ever-weaker immune system. Placards waved at pro-Palestinian demonstrations bearing slogans such as ‘Globalise the intifada’ and ‘Resistance by any means necessary’ depict Israel as the source of the world’s ills.

Universities host speakers praising ‘martyrdom’. Student unions declare Western civilisation ‘inherently genocidal’ – unthinking slogans for a generation that mistakes vehemence for virtue, and for whom, in some cases, hatred has become holy.

Authorities across the West reassure their populations that the protesters’ calls for ‘jihad’ and ‘intifada’ must be contextualised and tolerated, that these words are merely metaphorical. Australia’s 14/12 proves the opposite.

As a terrorism expert told me: ‘Islamic State is now global because, increasingly, so is radicalisation. The year before Bondi wasn’t just marked by rising anti-Semitism; it was marked by a far broader loosening of moral guardrails across Western democracies, and the mainstreaming of extremist rhetoric within pockets of Western Muslim communities.’

The Sydney Opera House with a Hanukkah menorah projected on its sails following the Bondi attacks

Ideas once considered fringe have been given new oxygen by Gaza, social media echo chambers, and street protests ‘for Palestine’ in Western cities.

Most of those who marched will never lift a hand against anyone. They’ll signal their virtue on Instagram and then get an ordinary job.

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But the slogans linger. They create a permissive environment in which a minority – already radicalised, already searching for justification – hear not a metaphor but an instruction.

The effects are clear to see. According to the Global Terrorism report, ‘lone wolf’ operations now dominate in the West, accounting for 93 per cent of fatal attacks over the past five years. Most used readily available weapons and required minimal planning.

As my expert concludes: ‘What is happening on the streets of cities across the West is dangerous. People don’t understand the degree of extremism that is being fomented; how dangerous it is.

‘In the Bondi case we can say that Mindanao taught the Akrams how to kill. But what they’ve seen on our streets over the last three years, and in our institutions over the last 20, taught them why.’

Until we confront both the how and the why, we will see more days like Bondi – when our age of global terror turns celebrations of light into arenas of darkness, and when the boundaries between foreign wars and domestic life collapse into a single, devastating moment.